Why I Wish NIN’s ‘Strobe Light’ Was Real

The April Fool’s joke that got the biggest laugh out of me today was [this gag from Trent Reznor][1], promoting the release of Nine Inch Nails’ newest album, ‘Strobe Light’, produced by R&B/Hip-Hop/Pop producer [Timbaland][2]. If that’s not enough to get a laugh, there’s the beautiful tracklisting that spoofs alt.goth culture while coming up with totally off-the-wall ideas for potential collaborators for such an album…

As the day wore on, I started thinking about just why this particular joke appealed to me so much, and why — as horrid as this may seem to some people — yes, I wish this one wasn’t a hoax. If this were a real album, I’d _gladly_ pay good money to pick it up.

Sometime back in 1990 or 1991, I found ‘[Pretty Hate Machine][3]’. I don’t even remember quite how I found it, though I think it was a cassette being passed, copied, and dubbed around the Anchorage alternoscene at the time, spreading the word the way good music does — via word of mouth. You know, exactly the way the music industry does everything in its power to prevent. Anyway.

It’s no exaggeration to say that I got _really_ into NIN…perhaps even minorly obsessed. As the years went by, I grabbed every bit of music I could find that escaped from Trent’s clutches. All of NIN’s albums and singles, bootleg CDs of live albums, side projects, other bands that he did remix or production work for…anything I could find, I snagged. [This archived page][4] from my first website (circa 1996) catalogs everything I’d managed to track down at the time (including the Butch Vig remix of ‘Last’ which, when I found it, I’d had to download in five or six chunks and then piece together into a single 2MB .mp3 file in order to listen to it…and since the track is four and a half minutes long, you can guess that it was highly compressed and not very good quality).

Anyway, the point is I was _huge_ into NIN and, more broadly, anything that Trent worked on. As far as I was concerned, he could do no wrong. A big part of why I was such a fan was the breadth of style that Trent’s work encompassed. While yes, all of Trent’s work fits solidly in the ‘industrial’ über-genre, there was a definite sense of progression and evolution to his work between 1988 and 1994. Songwriting, production, the sounds and techniques, all of it grew from album to album.

After ‘[The Downward Spiral][5]’ and its associated remix albums were released, Trent took a bit of a break. During that time, the occasional article would come out detailing Trent’s [personal struggles][6], and occasionally there’d be a interview or two, usually something along the theme of, “what will NIN do next?”

In one of these interviews — and sorry, but I haven’t got a _clue_ when, in what magazine, or in what context this appeared in — Trent was talking about how he’d been listening to a lot of hip-hop, and getting to know and working with a lot of pop and hip-hop artists. He talked about how they’d been influencing his music, and said something about how his next release would probably piss off a lot of his early fans, because of his new inspirations and the new directions he was going to take. About the same time, he did [a remix of Puffy Daddy and the Family’s ‘Victory’][7] that absolutely _floored_ me. I don’t like ‘gangsta’ rap, I’m by _no_ means a fan of P-Diddy, but Trent’s work on that song took the inner-city extroverted rage of the ‘gangsta’ and wrapped it in the distortion-ridden black-clad self-destructive introverted rage of the industrial genre and made it _work_. Okay, so that description doesn’t exactly make it sound appealing, but hey, that’s what it sounds like to me.

This really exited me. I’ve never been much into rap (and especially hardcore ‘gangsta’ rap), but I’ve often found that that’s less to do with the rapping — I’ve heard some _incredible_ rapping over the years — and more to do with the boring, unimaginative beats and the violent, misogynistic lyrics. Rappers who could do something interesting were fine, and when I’ve found them, I’ve been more than happy to toss money their way (I’ve got a pretty good collection of both [The Beastie Boys][8] and [Public Enemy][9], among others [yes, I know…could I _be_ any more of a middle-class white boy?]). Most of it just didn’t catch my interest.

But if Trent could combine his songwriting and production skills with the catchy pop hooks and lyrical skills of some of the best of the hip-hop world? I was _really_ looking forward to seeing what would come out. After his years of coming up with music that I loved, I trusted Trent to find good artists to work with, and even if I didn’t end up liking everything that came out of this “new direction,” I felt sure that there would probably be more than a few gems that would make it worthwhile.

So I waited. Sometimes more patiently than others, but I waited. And eventually, word came out that there was finally going to be a new Nine Inch Nails album. Finally! The day of release, I went to the store and got my copy of ‘[The Fragile][10]’, took it home, put it in my CD player…

…and that was one of only a few times that I’ve bothered to actually listen to that album straight through. For the first time since I’d discovered him, Trent had created a Nine Inch Nails album that, to my ears, was simply “more of the same old thing.” Only it was a little more disappointing than that, it actually felt like it was _less_ of the same old thing. It felt to me like he’d just taken all of the moody, introspective, instrumental or near-instrumental noise collages from ‘The Downward Spiral’ and its two remix albums and stretched them out into two discs worth of droning, with a few tracks that he’d thrown a drum kit at for a little variety.

Obviously, I was let down.

I still have a lot of respect for Trent’s abilities, and I’ve kept an eye on his work since then, but ‘The Fragile’ was the last full album of NIN’s that I’ve bought. I gave the five-dollar version of [Ghosts I-IV][11] (which only has Ghosts I, or tracks 1-9 of the full album) a shot, and have been grabbing whatever he releases for free as they’ve been announced ([The Slip][12] and the [NIN|JA 2009][13] tour sampler), but still, none of it grabs me. It all feels like as much as Trent has been doing a bang-up job creating (from what I’ve heard and read) incredible live shows, online ‘Alternate Reality Games’ for his albums, and telling the music industry to take a flying leap, his music just doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere since the mid-1990’s.

Or, perhaps, I’m just a stodgy old Elder Goth wannabe, pining for the good old angst-filled days of his black-clad youth. It’s a possibility.

So, when I see the hoax promo page for ‘Strobe Light’, I laugh at the silliness of it all…but I also wish, just a little bit, that it wasn’t a hoax. That Trent had actually followed through with his threats of oh-so-long-ago, gathered together with pop and hip-hop artists, blended and mangled their talents with his, and produced something _truly_ interesting, bridging the brainless shiny of the pop world, the brainless bling of the hip-hop world, and the hopeless angst of the goth/industrial world into one bizarre, but brilliant, whole.

I agree with him about the fragile to a point! I was disappointed with only the fragile album for the first 2-3 times I listened to it! Gave it a break,then listened again after a year & it really grew on me..more & more! I love everything he has ever recorded since then & can never see a time when I won’t spend money to hear new stuff on media or live! I would actually love to have heard some of the joke record ideas..as I side project..it would be interesting!! Paul

I think the reason why “The Fragile” disappointed you is because you expected it to be a carbon copy of his earlier work. Trent progressed, both musically and personally, in a tremendous way in the void between The Downward Spiral and The Fragile. That progression is very obvious in the 2 discs it took to tell the tale. Now, after The Fragile, you have turdballs that are “With Teeth”, “Year Zero”, and especially “The Slip”. Those albums also tell a tale, but that tale is a cross between whining about the political system by which he is governed (I agree that America is screwed up, so I can get past that) and his hatred toward what had become the recording industry. It is almost like he released crap just to tell the record companies to screw off. In his attempt, though, he lost many listeners… Me included, I’m afraid to say. Now, with his How To Destroy Angels project, I feel that the musical Trent that we know and love is back, just with his wife as the voice of the project. I highly recommend it!

Archives

TL;DR: The phrase ‘Black lives matter’ carries an implicit ‘too’ at the end; it’s saying that black lives should also matter. Saying ‘all lives matter’ is dismissing the very problems that the phrase is trying to draw attention to.

137 of 509, or 27% of my Facebook friends, are publicly displaying their support for full equality, regardless of sexual orientation. That’s a huge percentage, even for an admittedly self-selected group of contacts, most of whom are highly likely to share my general beliefs.

Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms.

In general, I think we need to move away from the premise that being a good person is a fixed immutable characteristic and shift towards seeing being good as a practice. And it is a practice that we carry out by engaging with our imperfections. We need to shift towards thinking that being a good person is like being a clean person. Being a clean person is something you maintain and work on every day.

But what the story really says, this story men made up to hold women down, is that women have the power to change the world. Women have the power to throw the world into chaos and they do it because the world as it is isn’t good enough.

Saved here for my own reference, and possibly others’ if they should stumble across it: the easiest workflow I’ve found yet for converting DVDs or Blu-Rays for personal use on OS X, including OCR conversion of subtitles in either VOBSUB (DVD) or PGS (Blu-Ray) format to text-based .srt files suitable for use as soft subs.

I think Obama’s general idea is a good one, and I support it and the thinking behind it. I just wish I could be more optimistic that students in Washington would actually have a chance to take advantage of it.